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With the Linux 4.10 kernel merge window expected to open this weekend, I was digging around to see whether there was anything new on the BUS1 front and whether we might see it for the next kernel cycle.

For those curious how the latest open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver code is comparing to yesterday's AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 release, here are some fresh OpenGL Linux driver benchmarks from a few AMD graphics cards.

Waking up this morning I was pleasant surprised to see that OpenBenchmarking.org has now served over 21 million test profile and test suite downloads via the Phoronix Test Suite! As of writing there have been 21,011,121 downloads!

This week's news of Qualcomm sampling a 10nm 48-core ARMv8 SoC for servers made me wonder where are AMD's ARM SoCs -- and the long-awaited development boards -- and thus been following up with a few sources this week.

Intel developers are working on "five level paging" to overcome the x86_64 limitation of 256 TiB of virtual address space and 64 TiB of physical address space. While you may not have that much memory in your desktop, that limitation is being hit but can be increased through 5-level paging.

A nine-year-old Mesa bug has now been squashed by Marek Olšák. This Mesa bug ended up affecting the RadeonSI driver and causing stability issues, which has now been addressed and should help open-source AMD Linux gamers run titles like Team Fortress 2 and Batman Arkham: Origins (Wine).

8 December

While AMD developers have been working to improve their "DAL" (now known as "DC") display code for the better part of the past year and this code is needed for new hardware support as well as supporting HDMI/DP audio on existing AMDGPU-enabled hardware plus other features, it's still not going to be accepted to the mainline kernel in its current form.

This morning's AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 preview included some 16.40 vs. 16.50 hybrid driver benchmarks, but for those wondering how 16.50 compares to Mesa 13.1-dev for RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan, here are some preliminary tests for the two current Vulkan AAA Linux games.

Toward the end of November was a discussion that started about potentially dropping all of the FBDEV Linux kernel drivers that are currently in the staging area, but it doesn't look like that will go through, at least until the relevant hardware has seen basic DRM driver ports.

AMD developers sent out a "request for comments" of their Display Core (DC, formerly known as DAL) code-base that they are hoping to merge soon as it's needed for the bring-up of future GPU support. It looks like they will initially merge the code just for the yet-to-be-released GPUs and will then gradually switch it on for currently supported Radeon GPUs.

The embargo has just expired on the Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition release, which had leaked out a few days ago elsewhere. While Crimson ReLive Edition is a big update for AMD Windows users, on the Linux side there's less to talk about but it's still a rather big release. I've been testing the AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 release the past two weeks and overall it's a sizable update for those using this hybrid AMD Linux driver.

While Chrome 55 has JavaScript async/await support, the Firefox support isn't coming until the Firefox 52.0 stable release in March while currently it's available in the latest Firefox Developer Edition and early alpha builds.

SIGGRAPH Asia 2016 is happening this week in Macau and it's from that event where yesterday they announced their new VR initiative. The Khronos slides from their presentation are now available plus another VR company has already become a member of The Khronos Group for helping to push this new, open, cross-vendor VR standard.

With now having netperf in the Phoronix Test Suite as well as iperf3 for the latest open-source benchmarks in our automated cross-platform benchmarking framework, I couldn't help but to run some networking benchmarks on a system when trying out a few different Linux distributions and BSDs to see how the performance compares. The operating systems ran with these networking benchmarks included Debian 8.6, Ubuntu 16.10, Clear Linux 12020, CentOS 7, and Fedora 25. The BSDs tested for this comparison were FreeBSD 11.0 and DragonFlyBSD 4.6.1.

With more laptops abandoning DVD drives, USB-based flash drive installers being well supported and widely-used, and CD/DVDs just being far less popular these days, Fedora developers are discussing the future of the official status for optical images in future Fedora releases.

It's been a while since publishing any fresh Intel Core i7 5775C benchmarks, the socketed Broadwell CPU with Iris Pro 6200 graphics, since normally it's busy in the daily benchmarking churn of the server room for Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org / LinuxBenchmarking.com efforts. But with having been doing some maintenance on that system this week and loading a clean install of Ubuntu 16.10, I did some fresh benchmarks of the Iris Pro 6200 graphics using Mesa 13.1-dev and Linux 4.9, including a look at the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance for the Iris Pro graphics.

The Khronos Group is going public this morning with a call for participation of companies that are not yet Khronos members but looking to join a new initiative: developing a new, cross-vendor VR standard to allow for better virtual reality interoperability of hardware devices, game engines, and more.

Overall the Nouveau DRM updates for Linux 4.10 are significant after they missed out on any feature changes for Linux 4.9. Given all the churn, there's been a last minute pull into DRM-Next of some more fixes and other minor activity.

Phoronix Test Suite 6.8.0 is now available as the latest version of our open-source, fully-automated, reproducible benchmarking software for Linux, BSD, Solaris, macOS, Windows, and other operating systems.

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has offered some statistics about the Fedora 25 launch to date and is proposing some possible changes to release scheduling for the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution, including the possibility of moving to doing one major release per calendar year.

With the GCC 7 compiler having entered its stage three, feature development is basically over so it's a great time to begin running more benchmarks of this big compiler update that will be officially released as GCC 7.1.0 in early 2017. Up today are benchmarks of the latest GCC 7.0 development snapshot compared to GCC 6.2 and GCC 5.4 on an Intel Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E system running Ubuntu 16.10.

This week I provided a look at some of the interesting Vulkan engines/renderers on GitHub created by the community in the months since the Vulkan unveil. After that article forum goers and those on Twitter shared some other promising Vulkan projects worth looking at too if you are just looking for some Vulkan demos to watch, learn more about the Vulkan API yourself, etc.

It's been quite a while since last having anything to report on the KDE Calligra open-source graphics/office suite while surprisingly this morning it was pleasant to see Calligra 3.0 tagged for release.

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